In an recent post on the Yahoo! search blog, the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance team announce that later this week we would be seeing "Powered by Bind" on the organic search results pages of Yahoo! search.

About a month ago Yahoo! made the announcement that they had begun testing this merger in the U.S. and Canada markets. This transition will mark the move to a Bing powered Yahoo! search.

The post goes on to say that tests will begin to transition paid search accounts this week.

Yahoo! recently announced they are in the testing phase of have Yahoo! Search results powered by Microsoft. Initial testing will only provide the Microsoft powered results to about 25% of the U.S. search traffic on Yahoo!

During this testing the user will not notice a difference in the listings powered by Yahoo! versus those by Microsoft; however, other layout tests are being conducted with this Microsoft test. The near future will also see Microsoft powered results making it to Yahoo!'s mobile platform.

Following successful testing, Yahoo! states their timeline to roll Microsoft powered organic search results to all U.S. and Canada traffic in August or September of 2010. Paid search listings will following suite in October.

The “alliance” between Yahoo! and Microsoft was announced back in February of 2010.

What does this mean to you?

Users of Yahoo! will likely see more focus from the company on usability improvements and an effort to pitch Yahoo! has a complete launching point for all of your Internet needs. Less competition in search algorithms, but probably a smart business move for Yahoo! Time will tell.

Since Google's Caffeine search index announcement, all the buzz around search indexing has been about page load speed. In a May 26, 2010 report Google released some interested stats on some key factors that play into page load speed.

Key takeaways from the data:

• Average web page transfers 320 KB of data.
• Most websites could reduce their HTTP requests by combining JavaScript and CSS files respectively.
• The average page has almost 44 resources, 30 of which are images.

Some of the metric data does have a yep factor; though it's not all that suprising. The era of "cloud computing" lends a lot to the gets per post and hosts per request.  Just keep in mind, reduction of some of the reported metrix data could improve your web page's page download speed.

The data in the report is based upon a sample size of 4.2 billion pages. Yes, that is billion. We are talking about Google's search index.

Today Google announced that Caffeine has become it's new search index. Caffeine will provide Google searchers with 50% fresher results and will consist of the largest index of websites that Google has ever provided.

What really sets Caffeine apart is the way it indexes the web. The previous index fetched new content in layers. This would create a significant delay in how fast Google could bring new content. With Caffeine smaller "packets" of the index are constantly being updated to bring you fresher content.

This faster, fresher index by Google will no doubt change how the web is presented, but it will also change the thought of publishing content. Caffeine's ability to better crawl and index the web will increase the emphasis of importance of content you present on your website. Caffeine reinforces the basic theory of SEO, "Content is King" and now Google can find it even faster.